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After the fall of the Taliban women were promised many rights that have yet to be realized. According to international women’s rights organization, Womankind Worldwide, women in Afghanistan still face systematic discrimination and violence.via BBC.

The report admits that there have been some legal, civil and constitutional gains for Afghan women. But serious challenges remain and need to be addressed urgently, it states. These include challenges to women’s safety, realisation of civil and political rights and status.

Furthermore, women have received at least 25% representation in the government, but the culture surrounding female politicians and activists is still a hostile one.

“Women who are standing up to defend women’s’ rights are not being protected,” says Brita Fernandes Schmidt of Womankind Worldwide.
“My message, really, to the international community is: you need to address specific security issues for women,” she says.
“Women’s rights activists are getting killed, women’s NGO workers are getting killed, and that is not going to change unless some drastic action is taken,” Ms Fernandes continues.
Womankind Worldwide says the international community needs to fulfil promises made after the fall of the Taleban to help protect Afghan women.

What I find interesting about this is that the US government used the rights of women as its rationale for military aggression in Afghanistan. But now after the fall of the Taliban (and since we couldn’t find Bin Laden there you know and attempts at building a natural gas pipeline have failed) we are suprisingly not present to protect women. Oh the smell of hypocrisy, so rank.

Last week, the bodies of 26 Nigerian girls, aged between 14 and 18, were found floating in the Mediterranean Sea. Autopsies of the bodies confirmed that they drowned while attempting the dangerous and all too often deadly crossing from Africa into Europe. Theirs is a story that’s all too familiar: rather than being treated as murder at the hands of xenophobic, militaristic, nativist states, the deaths of migrants, Black people, and girls are all too often erased and ignored. Their names unknown, their lives cut short, these girls’ deaths are a deliberate attempt by the state to deter migrants, by any means necessary.

The girls’ bodies ...

Last week, the bodies of 26 Nigerian girls, aged between 14 and 18, were found floating in the Mediterranean Sea. Autopsies of the bodies confirmed that they drowned while ...

As I write this, thousands of people are being evacuated from Aleppo.*

The U.N. estimates 400,000 civilians have been killed in the besieged Syrian city since the war started in 2011, deeming it the worst human rights disaster of our century. A city that took four thousand years to build has been utterly decimated. Civilians are tweeting their final goodbyes. Women are committing suicide to avoid being raped and tortured. Evacuees are leaving one war zone for another. And the world has, for the most part,done nothing.

During the third plenary of the 13th International AWID Forum, Co-Creating New Futures, Coumba Toure made a powerful statement: “There will be no future if it’s not feminist.”

Hearing this statement, I immediately imagine a beautiful future where no one ever has to take the streets to demand their humanity; where land and water are always more sacred than profits; and where our bodies are never policed. However during the plenary, the Fearless Collective, an international collective of activists fighting gender violence through art, challenged participants to understand that in order to create that feminist future we have to suspend disbelief.

But what does it mean to suspend disbelief? According to Shilo Shiv Suleman, founder and ...

During the third plenary of the 13th International AWID Forum, Co-Creating New Futures, Coumba Toure made a powerful statement: “There will be no future if it’s not feminist.”

Hearing this statement, I immediately imagine a beautiful future where ...

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